Relationship Spotlight: Sarah Manning & Helena (Orphan Black)

Another Orphan Black post, another relationship – this show really knows its way around character interactions.  I’ve already talked about how much I like all of the clones’ relationships with each other, but Sarah and Helena deserve a separate post of their own.  Definitely my favorite clone duo in the whole batch.  (It’s hard not to talk spoilers with this show, and that ratchets up to basically impossible when Helena is involved, so read at your own risk.)

First of all, these two aren’t just clones.  They’re also twins, split from a single egg and carried by the same surrogate mother.  (Specifically, they’re mirror-image twins; Helena is left-handed while Sarah and the other clones are right-handed, and her internal organs are all opposite the usual side.)  The makes them unique from the others, along with the fact that their mother ran away with them before the mad scientists could get their feelers on the girls.  Sarah and Helena are the lost clones, the two who didn’t grow up under Dyad’s surreptitious watchful eye.

Pretty much from their first meeting, when Helena is still under the thrall of the proletheans and killing clones for them, there’s something special about their connection.  With Helena’s programming, she has no qualms about murdering her other sisters, but she goes out of her way to avoid killing Sarah.  She senses something different; there’s a bond there that she can’t help but cling to.  And despite Helena’s horrific actions all throughout season 1, the thought of permanently taking her out is massively hard for Sarah.  It’s only after some intensely personal betrayals on Helena’s part that Sarah can even consider it.

Obviously, their relationship has enormous growing pains (attempted kidnapping and point-blank shooting will do that,) but they’ve come tremendously far.  For a long time, Sarah’s the only clone who has any meaningful interactions with Helena.  It means she’s the one who has to rush in and try to contain Helena when she goes off the rails, but it also means she’s the only option when Helena is in trouble.  Against every shred of common sense, Sarah finds she starts to care about Helena, recognizing how she’s been used and lied to, seeing how much she craves someone she can love.  And although they frequently backslide – Helena is so volatile that it’s pretty unavoidable – she sets about trying to convince Helena that they can trust each other.  Sarah’s the one to finally introduce Helena to the others, to convince them that Helena is no longer a threat and to assure Helena that they’re all family.

These two are sort of the “action clones.”  Both women are resourceful, often underhandedly so, and they have a knack for getting through tough situations.  Helena likes to think of Sarah as weaker and incapable, and it’s true that Sarah doesn’t have Helena’s scary prolethean training, but ultimately, they work excellently in tandem.  When they’re both imprisoned by one of the ever-growing number of factions fighting of a piece of the clones, they look out for each other and work together to escape.  (True, Helena gets out and leaves Sarah behind, but 1) volatile, like I said, 2) she’d been told lies about Sarah, as she so often is, and 3) she comes back for her in the end.  Baby steps.)  The Sarah-Helena stuff, by the way, is my favorite part of the entire Castor base storyline, and I absolutely love Sarah’s discovery that Helena has been captured and her determination to find and rescue her.  For much of this season, helping Helena has been Sarah’s main focus, and considering all the incredibly awful crap that went down between them in season 1, that’s really saying something.